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Build Adaptive Capacity
Historically, autumn has been considered the season of harvest. Summer’s stretch transforms water, sunlight, and nutrients to create the bounty of harvest. In autumn’s folding, we celebrate the abundance that will feed us during winter’s resting times. Autumn has been honored in many traditions as a time of thanksgiving for this abundance. A quick perusal of the Internet provided me insights about these kinds of celebrations around the world, at different times, in both the northern and the southern hemispheres.
Build Adaptive Capacity
My 65th birthday isn’t the only reason I’m thinking about end of life. I’m hearing stories of death and dying from many people: Family, friends, friends of family, and families of friends. We also mark the passing of a generation that lived with the Holocaust, WWII, and the birth of TV and rock and roll. We experience the ultimate outcomes of the opioid industry, big oil, and the gun lobby, either in person or through the media. It would seem that death is all around us.
November 2, 2023
We all know a simple, structured process for making decisions. We also know when and how that process fails. The simple step-by-step falls apart when change is fast, information is unreliable, and perspectives are multiple. In the 1990s decision scientists named the “garbage can” approach to explain the real world of decision making in action, but this random approach is not fast or robust enough to respond to challenges today or tomorrow.
HSD acknowledges the complex and emergent dynamics of decision making and provides a tool to help make it explicit and reasonable. This session introduces the Decision Map and gives you a chance to practice using it on your own most wicked challenges, whether you are new to HSD or have been using HSD at home, at work, or at play.
Build Adaptive Capacity
In turbulent times, many variables influence the dynamics of human systems. Today, in Ukraine, we are seeing complex dynamics play out in real time. Our guest blogger this week, HSD Associate Bohdan Yarema, reflects on how global dynamics influence patterns today and tomorrow in his homeland.
Manage Strategic Change
The problem is that we expect certainty and get surprise. Accountability, responsibility, performance, reliability, trust, quality—all these basic concepts of business require the insight to predict and the power to control.
The silence is not deafening, but it is pretty hard to hear. The Ethics Survey we hosted this week got only 7% of the responses we received to the Leadership Survey last week. I have some ideas about why that is true, so I’d like to talk about the silence as well as the signal.
Build Adaptive Capacity
To thrive in complexity you have to adapt—quickly and often! You can’t afford to wait for deep analysis or complete data. You don’t have time to take things apart, fix each piece, and put them back together. Even if you could, complex systems are massively entangled and emergent, so fixing parts may not fix the whole.